What do I edit in Firefox to kill a rogue app that automates opening new tab?

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1

It would be funny if I hadn’t been busy but I was obtaining help from HP to sort out a managed switch problem. HP guy was brilliant but I mistakenly clicked on a link from HP which ran away with my system. If I killed Firefox, as in “closed” it came back to life and went on opening tabs.

To solve my switch problem I rebooted to a windoze partition and with HP help was able to sort out my switch problem, which was great, but how can I clean up FF in TW?

After finishing with windoze I was able to boot back to my TW system and have started Chromium in order to write this without touching FF.
Will try de-installing and hope my bookmarks will remain somewhere within ~.mozilla but what the **** is going on?
Any ideas.

2

You could try edit prefs.js in profile and set browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes to 0.

3

Hi and many thanks for the quick reply. Clearly I am in a dragon’s den. Several “defaults” in my .mozilla/firefox/ directory. No idea which should be the current or how to clean up the dragon’s droppings! This is what I found:-

alastair@localhost:~/.mozilla/firefox> ls -l 
total 28 
drwx------  2 alastair users 4096 May  5  2020 **08ncinj8.default** 
drwxr-xr-x 17 alastair users 4096 Mar  2 16:32 **4hl4l8xj.default-1567000708039** 
drwx------  3 alastair users 4096 Feb 25 09:22 **Crash Reports** 
-rw-r--r--  1 alastair users   68 Aug 28  2019 installs.ini 
drwx------  2 alastair users 4096 May  5  2020 **Pending Pings** 
-rw-r--r--  1 alastair users  203 Aug 28  2019 profiles.ini 
drwx------ 13 alastair users 4096 May  7  2020 **qcavn309.default-release** 
alastair@localhost:~/.mozilla/firefox>

I confess editing the prefs.js was in the too difficult category so I uninstalled and re-installed FF.
Pleased to report the gremlin has gone, so I can use FF once more and all my history and bookmarks are intact, but how should I clean out all the rubbish? A job for a rainy day but are there any guidance notes anywhere?

Many thanks again.
Budge

4

Take a look inside profiles.ini to see if you have more than one profile represented. If more than one, start Firefox from a terminal:

firefox --ProfileManager

to delete stale profiles, which will probably be represented by the 08ncinj8* and qcavn309* directories. If not more than the current one (4hl4l8xj*) shows in profiles.ini, simply delete the 08ncinj8* and qcavn309* directories to reclaim the wasted space. Anything you have under Pending Pings can be deleted as well.

5

Hi and many thanks. I ran the command but I get a very strange result which is the same with or without having FF open:-

alastair@localhost:~> firefox --ProfileManager 

###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lo
st 

alastair@localhost:~> firefox --ProfileManager 

###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lo
st 

alastair@localhost:~>

Looking at the dates of the contents I suppose I should just delete the stale directories but would like to understand a bit more. What is strange for me is the that the 08ncinj8* default without numbers looks like it should be the working profile, but clearly not.

6

The easiest way to fix Firefox is to delete the .mozilla directory or rename it as .mozilla.bad

7

Hi and thanks for the advice. I suspect you are giving good advice but would appreciate a few more details. When I delete everything as you suggest, how are all the data which I wish to retain, for example history and bookmarks, rebuilt and from where?

8

What I would probably do is rename (for later removal) it and restore from a backup made before the incident happened.

9

if you want to save the bookmarks and history you can restore and import them to the new version.

Select on History > show all history - then do the backup for your history and export bookmarks - exit Firefox - do the rename in case you want to go back.

when you restart Firefox it will make a new .mozilla - History > show all history them restore and import the files you made.

10

I can’t explain that. It’s always worked for me. Does this work?

firefox -no-remote --ProfileManager

If not, try, closing Firefox, logging out of your DE session, then restarting the DE and running it. Also, paste here content of

cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

if still getting error messages. Also, to make sure, best to shut Firefox down before doing any of this.

Also, making any change to .mozilla/ directly is generally unecessary overkill. Firefox profiles aren’t the only content in .mozilla/. Mine has 29 files in it. If you want to rename anything, rename the actual profile directories within .mozilla/, after inspecting firefox/firefox.ini. Profile manager isn’t really needed. Profiles can be manipulated simply by editing firefox/profiles.ini to add, remove or modify profiles, including to specify an entirely different location for profile data if you desire, e.g. on an NTFS partition for sharing the profile with Windows.